Obama Administration's Slippery Slope on Torture

By Brigitte L. Nacos
The Obama administration has not repudiated the most troubling Bush administration’s human rights violations in the treatment of terrorists and alleged terrorists, namely torture and extraordinary renditions. Among the president’s first executive orders was one that banned coercive interrogation methods beyond those techniques listed in the Army Field Manual. But CIA director Leon Panetta said during his confirmation hearing that he would ask for additional authority if those techniques would not be enough to get a detainee to spill the beans about an imminent terrorist attack. This was precisely the red herring that the Bush administration and the authors of the “torture memos” used to justify “aggressive interrogations” or torture: a terrorist who knows about a ticking bomb that will cause unspeakable harm unless he can be forced to talk.

Jane Mayer in her excellent book “The Dark Side” and Philippe Sands in his equally gripping “Torture Team” reveal that Jack Bauer of the Fox TV-series “24” influenced the American interrogation doctrine of the Bush administration. John Yoo and other legal experts who rendered opinions in support of torture were enthusiastic fans of the show and its hero. The “ticking time bomb” scenario that Panetta alluded to is effective in “24” fiction and Jack Bauer heroics and often used in real life to justify torture.

Thus, four weeks before leaving office, Cheney said in an interview with the Washington Times that aggressive interrogations were “directly responsible for the fact that we've been able to avoid or defeat further attacks against the homeland for 7 1/2 years." Never mind that there is not a shred of evidence that this scenario unfolded in the post-9/11 war against terrorism.

But based on what he said during his confirmation hearing, the new CIA director has also bought into this “ticking bomb” myth.

It is equally troublesome that Panetta said the CIA might continue the “extraordinary extradition” practice which is a more benign term for the outsourcing of torture to foreign governments. Ahead of President Obama’s trip to Canada, an editorial in today’s New York Times revisits the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent. Mr. Arar was arrested at Kennedy Airport in 2002 during a stop-over on his way from Syria to Canada and “renditioned” to Syria where he tortured in the worst ways. Even when it was it was crystal clear that Arar had no ties to terrorism, the Bush administration prevented the legal action he sought against the U.S. government by invoking national security considerations. Now the Times is urging President Obama to “demonstrate his commitment to human rights and the rule of law by addressing Mr. Arar’s case.”

But how can this president demonstrate his commitment to human rights as long as he has not ended once and for all the extraordinary rendition program? As the Los Angeles Times noted, “Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.”

To put it mildly, this is not what I expected from President Obama and his administration. 

Comments

[Eric Chen]

The policy pre-dates the show. Leon Panetta is from the Clinton administration and "extraordinary rendition" originated in the Clinton administration.

See http://www.aclu.org/safefree/extraordinaryrendition/22203res20051206.html

If anything, the TV show was likely inspired by the same real-world events during the 1990s that compelled the Clinton administration to employ the "extraordinary renditions" that Bush administration, and now the Obama administration, inherited.

I'm a Stuyvesant High School graduate. I was too young and naive to understand the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center at the time, but I was there - in class - on Feb 26, 1993, at the same time Bill Clinton was just past the 1 month mark of his presidency. The TV show may be representative of a shared reaction, but it's not the cause.

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